In which Christmas greetings are explored and the awkward Christmas homemovies of the Hancocks are enjoyed.
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A huge rack – a mosaic – of holiday greeting cards stands before Carson’s camera. He meticulously closes in on a card, a Sunday school painting of delighted, handsome Jesus counseling some cute kids. “Happy Birthday to me!” He says, as if he’s the last one to join in. “In case you’re wondering, I don’t hate Christmas,” Carson narrates. “I like the parties and the shared ambiance that we are all in a holiday season.
“What I am is curious: Why is there Christmas?” Down the long aisle of cards, an old woman, in gray flannel overcoat picks through the cards with a deft intolerance. She is oblivious to us.
When she plucks one from the rack, there’s a nice cut to a single card in someone’s hand. It’s a purple and silver duo tone photo of frosty Christmas ornaments hanging in a blurry space that read Season’s Greetings.
“It’s definitely not an empty holiday. People generally agree it’s a time to be nice to each other. Devoting a time of the year celebrating kindness is more than just filled with good intentions. It’s slightly radical.”
The card is flipped open and inside, with gold cursive lettering the card majestically reiterates its cover invitation: Season’s Greetings. To You and Yours.
Peace. Peace on Earth. Peace to All. Goodwill. Goodwill to all Mankind. Celebrate! Ring in the Season! Let It Snow! Merry Christmas. Happy Holidays. Time of Year. Greetings. Cheer. Joy. Bright. Blessing. Peace. Season. Happy. Sparkle. He finds these and more on bus stop posters, sprayed on store windows, dangling in office breakrooms, medical waiting areas, on countless commercials and advertisements. A nerdy goateed store clerk in the unqueasy adult goods store Sexy Time mischievously holds up a candystriped dildo that freely waggles in his hand.
“Even the word celebrate can’t live up to its own expectations.”
Over a continuing pastiche of images, of Christmas in the here and now collected from news outlets or which he shot himself, Carson proceeds:
“Thousands of years of accumulated traditions roll through our lives every year. Some of it sticks....
[a huge lighted display outside a suburban home with luminous nodding reindeer, an inflatable Santa on a motorcycle, bushes, trees and gutters outlined with flickering redgreenblue and snowy white bulbs.]
“Some of it rolls past with incomprehension....
[several people in a summertime Brazilian plaza stare back in wonder at an enormous wire sculpture of a goat with a scarf and ski cap. It looks forty feet tall.]
“Some of it is perpetuated because it’s so arcane you think celebrating with it is source material for the true Christmas....
“But really, it’s a mystery. Literally. A liturgical mystery event.”
[It’s a Wonderful Life: ‘Zuzu’s petals!’]
“Without noticing it, we’re playing with a trunk of mysterious emblems, icons, devices, memories and tributes not only in store windows and commercials, but Christmas movies, books, plays, music. In the dreamlife of our society, our culture, a small niche is devoted to characters groping toward ‘a true meaning of Christmas’ ....
[Maureen O’Hara, unconvincingly modern and atheistic in Miracle on 34th Street: “I think we should be realistic and completely truthful with our children. Not let them grow up believing in a lot of myths and legends. Like Santa Claus, for example.” Answered by Alistair Sim, practically spitting ‘Humbug.’]
“What amazes me every year,” Carson explains over, I suppose obligatory, images of Eisenhowerian domestic Christmas perfection, “is the effort. Even though it’s a complete mystery, we work to get it right. Every year we re-receive that mystery in our hands and hold on to it for dear life.”
Green yellow orange white flares of Super 8 film float and coalesce into the deliciously warm image of a living room, circa 1976, with a silver-twined and fat Christmas tree potted with heaps of presents.
“My family wasn’t immune to this. Christmas for us was a colossal event at the end of every year. Lots of planning, expectation and disappointment went into it, the way it is with other families. But layers upon layers of mysterious tradition, added to family obligation, is very combustible.”
A series of home movies spanning maybe twenty years, begins with the sound of a needle dropping onto an LP, calling forth the cavernous voices of the Mormon Tabernacle choir and its beehived altos importuning “O Holy Night.”
O holy night! The stars are brightly shining,
It is the night of our dear Saviour's birth...!
It is the night of our dear Saviour's birth...!
Thus to the Hancock family’s own trunk of mysterious Christmas memories.Same living room and decorated tree, probably the same Christmas. A youngish, square jawed blond man holding a baby that has tinsel hanging from its light blue Dr. Denton’s and a big red bow on its head. The young father bounces and coos at his baby. You can’t help thinking: It’s a boy! Cigars for everyone!
And the manly tenors river on:
A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices,
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.
It’s a cozy room and several people mingle in the background, cocktails in hand. A tree glows in the corner, some empty boxes litter the floor and a modish attractive woman in a short green skirt pushes up a wrapping and wrapping-festooned stroller to her husband holding the baby. She confronts without saying anything. He knows and shrugs. She leans close to him and makes a point or two emphasized with wide open hands. It’s the simple predawn of unrecorded audio, the silent era of homemovies. But you can make out a little of what they’re saying if you play it back a couple of times.
Fall! – on your knees! ....
She: Why -- did they give us --
He (looking over his shoulder): I don’t -- .
She: -- think we can’t afford one ourselv--?
He (shrugging again, then makes a face: we’ll talk about this later): Go put it --
He points awkwardly past the camera, bouncing child. The child’s bow slips to the side, then falls. The child watches it lay on floor off camera: bye-bye. Put off, she wheels the stroller past the camera, nicking the tripod a bit. We jolt a bit to the left as the young father panicking over the precarious camera lurches forward to catch it and in his alarm splays the child tightly against his cardigan, as if the camera were a long promised Christmas gift to himself and about to be taken away. The camera only turns to the left with a jostle, grounded again. Previously off frame but now revealed at frame’s edge: a slim well-dressed and coiffed bluehaired gran dame, her birdlike arms possessing the hell out of the armchair she presides from and staring bullets into the back of the departed young mother.
An older man – Grandpa, I guess – approaches in red cardigan, armed with highball, gitchy-goos the child. He speaks sotto voce: Where’s she -- to? He glares past camera. The child starts to cry. Young man fobs off child to Grandpa, walks to camera, click.
/continued
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Next: The Hancock kids grow up! Plus, The Germs
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